RELATED CATEGORIES

Diary

Alison Light

It’s four years since my husband, the historian and socialist Raphael Samuel, died of cancer at the age of 61. In the weeks after his death, I wrote about him every day. I filled a boxfile and an A3 ringbinder with anecdotes and observations, physical descriptions and characteristic phrases; I made notes on what he had told me of his childhood, on our marriage, on his work, on what we called his ‘Communist unconscious’; I even listed his shirts. I couldn’t stop writing; I was restless and, at times, euphoric. I accumulated thousands of words. I thought about writing an article. I knew how I wanted it to begin, with a quotation from one of Raphael’s love letters, written when I was coming up to London to visit him, a fortnight after we’d met:

Dear love,

Further to my previous note, for God’s sake, don’t buy any vegetables. I have the two big aubergines we bought on Sunday, the fat cauliflower, the half pound of mushrooms, a giant beetroot, a bag of fresh herbs, two baby marrows, and sundry greens . . .

Raphael’s succulent inventory was meant to woo me – I was a vegetarian at the time – but its seriousness was even more seductive, making me laugh out loud. After he died, I hankered after this sense of urgency more than anything. It was appetite in its purest form, and appetite was the only antidote to the deathly.

Writing was a way of staying close to Raphael; it was something we both did for a living and it shaped the rhythms of our domesticity. Scribbling random notes on the back of used paper (a habit of Raphael’s), I was also impersonating him. Behaving like the lost person, employing their gestures, finding that you use, quite involuntarily, their turns of speech, is a common response to loss. It’s a version of the searching which confirms the absence but also incorporates the presence of the dead, making tangible and visible again what perishes first of all – the body of the beloved. Raphael wasn’t dead for me yet and writing kept him in suspended animation. In the months to come I understood better the myth of Mausoleus, whose widow eats his ashes. What easier way to take in a death and to digest its consequences (what therapists call ‘internalising’)? For me words were necessary to this incorporation; I was looking for ways to feed on my loss.

There was something manic in my writing: perhaps it was a last-ditch attempt at playing God, a compensation for the helplessness I’d felt watching Raphael die. I hadn’t been able to stop that happening but now I felt that I, and I alone, had the key to his life. I was preparing the materials for a vast biography and at the same time imagined producing a succinct, authoritative piece which would allow me to have the last word. I see now that writing kept the grief at bay (though I collapsed periodically, leaning against the house walls for support or lying doubled up on the bathroom floor); that words were insulation and ballast, staving off the sense of weightlessness, the untethering which makes the bereaved kindred to the mad.

The full text of this diary is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.